A blended ABM strategy across prioritised tiers of accounts

We’ve been talking about the fractal 80/20 rule and how it applies to most companies’ portfolio of accounts for over two years now at Inflexion Group because we believe it should inform where you invest your time and resources to drive long-term growth. That includes marketing resources — especially ABM.

Just as a reminder, here’s how the 80/20 rule plays out for a company with £1bn of revenue across 1,000 customers.

Recently, our ABM benchmarking data revealed the most popular types of ABM used for each tier of prioritised accounts, demonstrating the blended ABM strategies that are in practice today. Here, we take a closer look at what the data is telling us.

Strategic ABM for the top 1%

Tier one customers receive the most resource-intensive types of ABM: Strategic ABM, either the full or lighter form (which we’re now calling Scenario ABM), and Deal-based or Pursuit marketing. Segment ABM, or one-to-few, is also used to a lesser extent in this tier, but almost no one uses Programmatic ABM for their top tier of accounts.

Segment ABM for the rest of the top 20%

For the second tier of accounts, the balance switches more in favour of Segment ABM, followed by Scenario ABM. Programmatic ABM is still rarely used for this tier of customers. Tier three follows a similar mix, but with more Programmatic and less Strategic ABM.

Programmatic ABM or other types of marketing for the bottom 80%

The other 80% of customers receive mostly Programmatic ABM or other types of marketing, such as industry or solution focused, but with an eye to spotting which customers could make it into a higher tier and receive more marketing investment at any point.

What about top prospects?

Top prospects are served by a mix of Segment ABM, Programmatic ABM and Pursuit marketing. The key here is to be laser focused in qualifying — and requalifying — opportunities and accounts in for this level of attention.

Don’t go it alone

Aligning your business around your top customers is a critical foundation for any successful account-based growth strategy. The way you allocate your ABM investment can be led to some extent by the way other functions are allocating their resources. Marketing, sales, and customer success or service delivery will have a similar blended approach to cover each tier. For example, key account managers and board-level executive sponsors may only be available to the top 1%.

There’s no one size fits all to this. We recommend analysing the way the 80/20 rule plays out in your business and facilitating the conversation around aligning investment with sales, customer success and your execs — it’s a great way for marketing leaders to add value and maximise return on investment.